Editorial: Quality of life, serious business

In all of the talk about foggy, quality-of-life metrics of bike lanes, cool restaurants and town/gown relations at Purdue University, it's good to keep in mind that Greater Lafayette's new community of choice report is at its heart a business plan.

But at Greater Lafayette Commerce, which got the ball rolling on this, the project wasn't about generating more bars and restaurants - even if that might be one of the offshoots of searching for that certain "it factor."

Community of choice boiled down to: How do we recruit and keep young talent? How do you make Greater Lafayette a destination for that young talent - not to mention for the businesses that hire them?

"Good to Great" breaks into an eight-part plan - along with some bonus ideas frosting the top - and looks at how to make this a more welcoming community and more happening place.

That's going to mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And by the metrics laid out in the plan, Greater Lafayette is already positioned in the middle of the pack of peer college towns, ranging from Madison, Wis., and Ann Arbor, Mich., to Bloomington and Asheville, N.C. So Greater Lafayette isn't starting at the bottom.

The first smart move was to give the community of choice effort a permanent place under the Greater Lafayette Commerce umbrella. A new committee of 24 or so people will be recruited to look at the recommendations about making the downtown better, looking at career options here, connecting better with Purdue students and more.

That act gives the plan a chance to live and breathe beyond the initial burst this week. Few of the goals will be overnight things.

The consultants showed a sense that they really did spend a lot of time in town with a shout out given to Liz Solberg, who helped guide Lafayette's massive rail relocation project to completion after three decades of work. If you didn't live with trains cutting through the middle of town or crossing the Wabash River on the two-lane Main Street Bridge, trust us, Solberg was a name you would have known during that time. Solberg, the consultants said in their credits, "proved - through Railroad Relocation - that Greater Lafayette can do anything it sets its mind to."

Hold on to that as the community of choice plan is put into place.

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Editorial: Quality of life, serious business

Our take: Greater Lafayette's new quality of life plan is, at its heart, a good business plan.